By Katherine Ramsland, Ph.D.

(Continued)

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Then there are anger management issues, especially for people who feel a strong need to control their environment and dominate others; they're more prone to inflicting chronic physical violence if they feel the threat of losing control.  In fact, it's a fearful reaction, intended to maintain a sense of safety by making everyone around them predictable.  Yet people — especially young children — are not so easily cowed.  The person who needs to dominate may take several increasingly aggressive steps to exert control, until they end up breaking bones, bruising, withholding food and water, locking children for long periods in a closet or room, and taking extreme measures of punishment that they justify as discipline.   They simply want to keep order in the home, but in the process, they damage the child, sometimes fatally.

Then there's the successful person who dominates others, who is atypical of the general profile.  They're not driven by fear but by the feeling that they're entitled to have their world just as they want it.  When someone in that world fails to conform, they feel justified in taking whatever steps they deem necessary to force that person to do what they want. Some parents, more typically the father, feel outright resentment toward a child, especially if the child disrupts an ordered world where they usually feel powerful and assured.  To such people, their own needs come first and must be met as they see fit.  The others are mere instruments in their goals. 

However, babies and young children have little comprehension of this and little ability to respond to adult needs. As such, they're vulnerable to being victimized, particularly by ongoing physical abuse.  If the abuse works to elicit the desired behavior, the abuser will use it again and again.  This person is used to success and will generally follow a pattern of behavior that ensures it. 

Sources

U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect. (1995). A nation's shame: Fatal child abuse and neglect in the United States. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children's Bureau. (2004). Child maltreatment 2002. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office.

Child Welfare Information Gateway, www.childwefare.gov

National Center on Child Fatality Review, http://.ican-ncfr.org.

National Infant Mortality Review Resource Center, www.acog.org/goto/nfimr

Emily Douglas and David Finkelhor, "Child Maltreatment Fatalities Fact Sheet"

Crimes Against Children Research Center

Herman-Giddens, M.E., et al., "Newborns killed or left to die: A population-based study," JAMA, 289: 11, 2003.

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